Archive for July, 2008

When you are going through any weight lifting program, it is fairly common for you to experience certain level of tiredness and pain in the beginning.

But, if you are feeling more tired or fatigue than your starting stage of weight training, then be alert! Extreme tiredness or weakness after performing any weight training exercise program is the most common sign of over training [Weight lifting equipment].

Overtraining your body can completely disable your muscle growth, which can make you to feel horrible.

Actually, overtraining is not at all recommended in any sort of weight training program and this should not happen because the main aim of any weight training program is to give desired results in body building, without causing much tiredness or weakness to your body.

Quick measures to avoid overtraining!

Give required rest for your muscles!

During your weight training routines, your muscles need certain time to heal in between your regular exercises. So, give a week gap in between your routine weight training program, so that your muscles will recover enough for another weight training workout.

Get more sleep!

U.S. children turn away from exercise in droves in their early teen years after getting much more exercise when they are younger, according to a study spotlighting a factor in the rise of youth obesity.

The research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, documented a steady decline in physical activity in 1,032 children in 10 places around the United States who were followed from ages 9 to 15.

Less than a third got the recommended levels of physical activity at age 15, the study found.

The findings do not bode well for the health of this generation in the decades ahead, the researchers said.

“We’re dealing with an obesity epidemic,” pediatrician Dr. Philip Nader of the University of California at San Diego, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

The researchers had each child in the study, which ran from 2000 to 2006, wear a small device called an accelerometer, which monitors physical activity, for one week at a time when they were ages 9, 11, 12 and 15.

Proper exercise is essential to maintain healthy joints. Individuals, who have their joints painful, keep them immobile for longer periods because they feel better in that way.

If you keep the joints immobile for longer periods, then they become stiff and lead to further loss of movement that can finally lead to deformity.

Moving the joints frequently is the only way to nourish and lubricate them. In severe conditions, lack of joint movement leads to the development of contractures.

This is the condition which leads to shortening of the muscles and shrinking of the connective tissues. Eventually, the ability of joint functioning is greatly reduced.

5 steps that help you to keep your joints healthy:

Regular physical activity:

The best method to keep the joints working properly is to exercise them on regular basis. Practice low impact workouts like swimming, walking, and cycling for at least 3-5 hours in a week. These activities keep your joints healthy with proper circulation and also help to maintain range of motion.

If you are having joint problems, then avoid doing high impact workouts like running and also any activity that causes pain.

The more variety of foods you eat, the better the chance that you get all the nutrients [Health Nutrition] needed to maintain good health.

In everyday life, you come across some of the foods that help to prevent the diseases and give various nutrients that make sense to those foods to eat everyday.

Here are the foods that you need to include in your everyday diet:

1. Yogurt:

Yogurt supplies enough calcium to your body. This food prevents you from getting osteoporosis, fights against bacteria, boosts your immune system, prevents yeast infection and has wonderful anticancer properties.

Remember that not all yogurts are probiotic, so make sure that you read the label before buying. Yogurt can be topped with walnuts, blueberry, honey, and flaxseed, which makes good breakfast for you. Also, plain and low fat yogurt can be added with creamy salad dressings.

2. Green tea:

Green tea has wonderful cancer fighting properties. It is rich in antioxidant content. Green tea helps to boost your metabolism, weight loss and also in maintaining weight.

You can drink green tea with or without the caffeine, or in hot or iced form.

3. Dark green leafy vegetables:

From strippercise to circus-trapeze aerobics, gyms and fitness gurus keep coming up with new ways to make working out less of a chore.

But though these whimsical classes and instructional DVDs can reinvigorate your gym routine, some of the glitziest (and goofiest) new trends can also put you at risk for sprained ankles, pulled muscles and overexertion. And some don’t even give you much of a workout.

Here are seven of the silliest fitness fads—with the lowdown on whether or not they really chisel and tone.

1. Weighted Hula Hooping. Maybe it was the 50th anniversary last month, or maybe it’s the buzz over the new Wii Fit version, but Hula Hooping, the backyard mainstay from the 1950s, is back—and a whole lot heavier.

National gym chains like Bally Total Fitness now offer hooping classes to kids and seniors alike, with weighted Hula Hoops that participants wheel around their outstretched limbs and torso.

Will the toy-based hybrid of strength and cardio give you the toned curves of Beyonce, who says she hoops to stay svelte? “The unweighted, traditional ones definitely work your core, and you can actually get the cardio system up,” says Jim White, certified fitness trainer and spokesman for the American Dietetic Association (ADA).

Compound exercises are multi joint movements that involve several large muscle groups. You can workout three to four muscle groups at a time.

The main benefit of compound exercise is you can workout whole body by performing few exercises in few minutes.

Isolation exercises involve one muscle and only one joint at a time. The idea to perform these exercises is to isolate one muscle group and move from one machine to another until you workout your whole body.

Therefore, when compared to isolation exercises, compound exercises allow lifting heavy weights and working more muscle groups at the same time.

Reasons to prefer compound exercises:

• More calories are burned during workout as more muscle groups are used.
• Helps in allowing full body workout quicker.
• Joint stability and muscle balance across the joint will be improved.
• Lets you to workout longer with less muscle exhaustion.
• Heavier loads can be lifted and more strength can be built

There are different compound exercises that work on several muscle groups at a time.

According to a study at Stanford University, California, getting some extra shut-eye could improve your fitness and athletic performance.

Researchers asked swimmers to stick to their normal sleep patterns of five to seven hours a night for two weeks and then to extend their sleep to ten hours a night for a further six weeks.

With the extra sleep, the swimmers swam a 15m sprint an average of 0.5 seconds faster.

They displayed quicker reaction and turning times in the pool as well.

‘Our results show what a significant factor sleep is in enhancing athletic performance,’ says Dr Cheri Mah of the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic which led the study.

‘Many athletes accumulate a large sleep debt which can have detrimental effects on cognitive function, mood and reactions.’

Similar results were found when basketball players, runners and tennis players were subjected to different amounts of sleep.

‘Many of our participants have set multiple new personal records while participating in this study,’ Mah says.

Her advice to those who work out regularly is to get at least seven to eight hours of sleep a night and to keep a regular sleep-wake cycle, going to bed and waking up at the same times of the day.

Do you practice treadmill in your regular body workouts? Are you aware of the most common mistakes in using a treadmill?

If you want to get into a perfect body shape and improve your overall health condition by practicing treadmill workouts, then know more about the most common mistakes that you need to avoid while performing treadmill workouts.

Treadmill workouts are one of the greatest methods to get cardio exercises for your body.

Proper walking form and also exact posture plays a vital role in reducing the pain and strain caused due to treadmill exercises.

So, to get best results in practicing treadmill exercises, avoid these particular mistakes while practicing.

Getting onto the treadmill while the belt is moving fast!

Even though it may seem like unnecessary advice, this is the first mistake that you have to avoid, while using treadmill. Never get onto a treadmill while its belt is moving at full speed, as this can make you to fall and cause injury to your body. So, to avoid such kind of body injuries, observe the speed of belt and then carefully get onto it.

Want to alter your existing eating habits and create new ones? Whatever the motivation will be, whether it was an off-handed comment from your spouse or looking at yourself in the mirror for first time, these types of things make you to put into the action.

Here are some wonderful tips that keep you on the track:

Note down the goals you want to achieve and also the motivating factors:

The main key for achieving the success is defining clearly where you like to finish up. If the goal is losing weight, then note down your weight before you start any program, measure yourself and put achievable goals within the time limit that you set.

Don’t set any goals that make you to lose more than 1-2 pounds within a week. Give yourself sometime to adjust to the new routine. So, till now you have defined your goal. The next thing you need to do is, write down what is the main cause behind your motivation to attain the goal.

According to the Japanese study, Eicosapentaenoic acid, or EPA — the essential omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid[omega-3 fatty acids] abundant in oily fish — may help protect stroke patients from suffering a second stroke[heart stroke].

In a study of people with high cholesterol[high cholesterol levels] who were taking a low dose of a cholesterol-lowering “statin,” researchers found that adding EPA did not reduce the occurrence of a first stroke but did lower recurrence rates in those with a history of stroke.

The finding, published in the journal Stroke, stems from a large study of patients with elevated cholesterol levels who were randomly assigned to a low dose of pravastatin or simvastatin daily alone or with 1800 milligrams daily of EPA for roughly 5 years.

Of the 9,326 patients in the EPA group, 485 had a history of stroke, as compared with 457 of the 9,319 patients in the no-EPA group.

Dr. Kortaro Tanaka of Toyama University Hospital and colleagues found that rates of first stroke were 1.3 percent and 1.5 percent in the EPA and no-EPA groups — a nonsignificant difference.